Photo: Baxter County Sheriff John Montgomery
Adoption of the budget for 2022 is among the items on the Baxter County Quorum Court’s agenda when it meets in regular session at 6 Tuesday evening. When the justices consider action on the budget, they will be asked to approve a new wage scale for the sheriff’s office, a project that has been in the works since early this year.
In September, the quorum court voted unanimously to adopt a new personnel policy manual for the sheriff’s office, the first step in the process to separate these employees in the county’s wage scale.
Sheriff John Montgomery says his colleagues across the state are facing the same compensation challenges as Baxter County. Montgomery says the steps being taken here to address these challenges are ones he believes are the first for a sheriff’s department in Arkansas.
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Instead, Montgomery approached the quorum court’s personnel committee with a plan for a new personnel policy manual for his department. After three meetings with the committee and the full court’s adoption of the new policy manual, the next step was to meet with the budget committee to seek approval for funding the new plan.
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While hiring has been a recent challenge for many, Montgomery says the difficulty in securing employees for his department is not a new development. He says law enforcement hiring presents its own set of challenges.
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Montgomery says in the 17 years he has served as Baxter County sheriff, his department has lost 21 certified law enforcement officers.
In part two of our story, Montgomery says his department is operating in crisis mode. He will identify the challenges his department is facing with regard to levels of compensation, the impact COVID-19 has had on his employees and the price tag for increasing the compensation for his employees under the new wage plan.
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